How to Conduct a Tweet Chat for Your Business or Brand

By Mikal E. Belicove|For Entrepreneur.com|August 13, 2010

To promote our recent book, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook, my co-author, Joe Kraynak, and I participated in a ‘Tweet Chat’ (also called a Tweetchat) about Facebook. If you have never heard of Tweet Chats and have no idea of what they are, just think of them as online, real-time conversations broadcast via Twitter. They are typically held at a pre-arranged time, among a group of Twitter users, using a specific Twitter hashtag–such as #AskCIG–to identify the discussion and Twitter users are invited to ask questions via tweets using the designated hashtag.

While all this sounds simple enough, conducting an effective Tweet Chat can be a little awkward, especially for the ill prepared. Although this feature is referred to as a chat, it is much more cumbersome than chatting online with any of today’s popular instant messaging platforms. Personally, I would rather conduct such an interview on a Facebook Page in the comments area of a Status Update; there at least the discussion is all in one place and easy to follow, instantly archived, and associated with whatever brand’s page it appears on. On Twitter, there’s no branding, the discussion is not archived in any reasonably accessible manner, and the platform itself is entirely devoid of the type of analytics today’s businesses need to gauge the effectiveness of the effort.

Be that as it may, Tweet Chats are another way to get the word out about your business and products, especially if you conduct an effective session. Following are some suggestions on how to do just that…